


Scars

by jeeno2



Series: Rebelcaptain Stories [8]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 17:32:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9282542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeeno2/pseuds/jeeno2
Summary: Jyn has scars.  But so doesn't he.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a tumblr prompt from anidlebrain.

Jyn only wants to be intimate with him in the dark.

He doesn’t realize that at first.  Hoth, after all, is a planet suspended in perpetual midwinter, and as such is dark most of the time.  The precious few moments they have for each other are usually at the very end of the day, when they’re both too tired from the cold and their hard manual labor to bother with turning on the light.

As time passes, however, Cassian begins to notice a hesitancy in Jyn during the day that contrasts sharply with the uninhibited way she loves him during the night.  In the morning, when he wakes up, no matter how early he wakes up, she is already out of the refresher and dressed, combing out her hair in front of the small mirror that hangs on his wall.  On the rare occasions they do have free time during the daytime she never agrees to take advantage of it with him back in his bunk – always insisting, instead, with an embarrassed flush on her cheeks he never sees any other time, that she still has more drills to run.

“What is it?” he asks her one morning, his voice still thick with sleep. Because he has to know.  It’s not even dawn yet, but already Jyn’s fully dressed, sitting in the straight-backed chair that leans against the wall and lacing up her boots.

He pulls back his blanket and walks over to her, not even bothering to pull on a robe.  She stops working on her boots and looks up at him.  He’s still naked – he’s taken to sleeping without clothes whenever Jyn spends the night; it just saves time – and he makes no attempt to hide any part of himself from her eyes.

She pauses before answering him.  She bites her lip.

“What is  _what_?” she asks, curtly.  “I’m getting dressed.  What does it look like?”

He shakes his head.  “I can see that, Jyn,” he says.  "But you’re always dressed.  Or… well,” he trails off, scratching at the back of his neck, trying to find the right words.  “You’re always dressed whenever I can actually see you.”  He crouches down on the floor in front of her and takes her chin in his hand so she has to look at him.  “Why won’t you let me see you?”

She closes her eyes.  She takes a long, shaky breath.

“You don’t want to know,” she says, her words so quiet he can barely hear them over the rattling hum of the air compressor.  

“Yeah.  I do,” he says.

She stands up from the chair, then, and moves over to the bed, her gait shuffling and reluctant. 

She turns to face him.  She switches on the small lamp that sits on his bedside table.

With a stoicism she usually reserves for disarming enemy targets Jyn tears off her shirt with one hand and tosses it to the floor, her eyes never leaving his face.

“This is why,” she says, her chin raised defiantly.

 

* * *

 

Jyn’s body, Cassian quickly discovers, is covered in scars.

There’s a long, jagged line that runs from the top of her breastbone, down between her breasts, and all the way down to her navel.  It looks like someone must have once tried to cleave her in half.  He traces the scar with a calloused fingertip as she lies back among the pillows, his eyes trained on her face as she watches him.  

“I got that big one when someone in Saw’s gang got too mouthy,” is all she offers by way of explanation. “The smaller ones on my arms are from… uh, another thing that happened when I was with Saw.”

He nods.  He doesn’t pry further, pleased she’s sharing at least this much given how reluctant she’d been for him to see any of her at all.

“Why have you been hiding these from me?” he asks, trying to keep the hurt and confusion from his voice.  Trying for tenderness instead, which has never been a strong suit.  “I don’t care about any of this stuff.  We’ve all got scars.  I sure as hell do.”

She lets out a small noise of frustration.  She rolls over onto her side so her back is to him.  When she does, he can see, for the first time, the many fine scar lines that crisscross her spine, her shoulder blades, and all the way up the back of her neck.

“What is it?” he asks.

She pauses, and then sighs.  “It’s not what the scars look like that made me not want to show you,” she tells him, her voice gone very quiet again.  “It’s what they say about some of the things I’ve done in the past.  Who I was before I came here.”

Cassian nods, even though she cannot see him do it.  

“I get that,” he says.  Because he does.  His body is covered with scars too, which together form a sort of tangible road map through his past.  He has a scar on his left arm from when he got into his first fight with a stormtrooper at age eight.  There's another behind his right elbow from the first time he slit a man’s throat.  Each indentation and mark and imperfection on his body is a daily reminder of the things he’s done that, if times were not what they were, would cause him to lie awake at night with crippling shame.

But times _are_ what they are. 

“It doesn’t matter who we were before,” he says, his hands gently rubbing her back.  “Or what we've done.  We’ve all got stuff in our past we’d rather not think about.  What matters is what we do  _now_ , and what we do going forward.”

He puts his hands on her shoulders and gently rolls her over so she’s lying on her back again.  To his relief, she comes willingly.  And then he decides he will kiss, and touch, every single mark, and every single indentation he can see on her body, to show her none of what happened before matters to him.  He presses his lips to the small nick at the hollow of her throat that someone must have given her with the sharp tip of a knife.  He runs his hands across her flat stomach, over pockmarks left behind by exploding ordnance when she was twelve years old.  He nuzzles the area between her thighs – a part of her he has grown to know intimately these past few weeks – and touches the tip of his nose to burn marks left behind on her right hip by stray blaster fire.  

He traces the lines that crisscross her arms, and her shoulders, with the tip of his tongue, stopping now and again to leave behind lingering kisses on the spots he knows are especially sensitive.

“I’ve got scars too, Jyn,” he tells her again.   _And n_ _ot all of them in places you can see._    He takes both of her hands and puts them on his chest, so that her palms cover the thick, coarse network of scars over his heart.  He presses a kiss to her lips.  “We just have to live with the past and move forward.”

She shakes her head.  "I don't know if I can," she says, her voice pained.

"You can," he assures her.

As he bends to kiss her again, he hopes that someday, she’ll believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to come say hello on tumblr I'm there as jeeno2. :)


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